WITH two more weeks until year 12 students finish their secondary studies, Mansfield Secondary College held a year 12 VCE vocational training major expo evening in the MSC STEM centre showcasing a range of upcycled items which the students had created throughout the year.
Over 100 people visited the exhibition.
VCE vocational major teacher Melanie Brooks said the purpose of expo was to learn about the environment and the kinds of behaviour and manufacturing that negatively affect it, including deforestation, waste and pollution.
“The students then went on to investigate things that industry, individuals and governments could do to help mitigate those negative effects and developed a plan to get parents, peers, and community to come in to learn about those mitigating approaches,” she explained.
“The way that they decided to do that was through holding an expo that would draw people in.
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“This idea evolved into an Up-cycle Exhibition, the criteria was to create a thing of beauty or purpose from things that would have otherwise gone to landfill.”
Some of the handcrafted items included a long wooden table decorated with colourful bottle tops, reusable fabric sandwich wraps, a bee house and salad dressing holders.
Sarah Hearn pieced together a dress from the pages of a book and shared some information about plastic pollution.
“It took me a long time to make the dress and I'm very proud of it,” Sarah said.
Zoey Young created colourful scrunchies using repurposed fabric scraps.
Harry Dunsmore, Bowdie Cliff and Jack Borg created wooden salad dressing holders.
Paddy Buchanan, Reilly Northcott and Paddy Dunstan decorated a wooden table with resin and bottle tops donated by members of the community.
Ms Brooks said the students made enough profit to purchase an outdoor table and chair set made in Australia and completely out of recycled materials.
“All of the students were incredibly proud of their efforts and were encouraged by all of the positive feedback they received.”
